


Ghost Stories

by theconstantgardener



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Ghosts, Inspired by Stephen King, it has a good ending though :), its so cold where I live that my brain broke and I wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 21:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30061860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theconstantgardener/pseuds/theconstantgardener
Summary: I realized that a lot of Stephen King's works are set in Maine, and nobody else had taken advantage of this to abuse Hawkeye, so it got stuck in my head and refused to leave. This was such a blast to write, and I think I might do more!Thanks for reading!
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Ghost Stories

The Korean dry winter was raging, with split lips and frostbite becoming the majority of cases that the doctors at the 4077th MASH were treating. Siberia itself would be jealous of the intensity of the weather cycle that had been currently overwhelming South Korea for the past two days. 

The entire camp was silent as 1800 hour came and went, and with it the last chance for patients to come in on helicopters for the night. As night fell and the temperature dropped into the single digits, enlisted men and officers alike huddled closer for warmth. 

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake shivered in his office, back pressed against the stove he and Radar were feeding papers into. 

“This is miserable. Everyone is miserable, even with next to no casualties pouring in. Are you miserable?” Blake addressed the corporal huddled next to him, who was wearing almost every item of clothing he owned. 

“Uh, yes, sir. Morale is low everywhere.” Radar said, wiping off his fogged over glasses with his third pair of mittens.

“Well, what do they want me to do? I can’t warm up Korea! I can’t do anything but wait out this cold front.” Blake muttered and glanced around the office. His eyes landed on one of his kid’s crayon drawings, and he lit up.

“Radar, can—” 

“We’re not authorized to make a fire, but we are authorized to raise morale.” Radar answered his unasked question, already moving over to the paperwork piles on Blake’s desk and sifting through the already notarized forms.

Blake nodded, mentally stacking firewood. 

“And really, since we’re a hospital, nobody is supposed to be bombing us. That’s not going to stop them, but at least we have some official backup if anyone questions us. And a bonfire isn’t a safety issue if we do it right. I hope.” Blake said, fishhooks rattling as he nodded. 

“The only difficult part is going to be dragging some of the officers out from their tents. At least we might be able to salvage some of their liver functions for another day if we do this soon enough.” 

Radar nodded and ran out of Blake’s office to spread the news. 

* * *

With the firewood gathered in a hastily dug pit and supplemented by spare requisition forms, the bonfire was ready. While not as large as it could be due to the ever-present threat of bombings, it was still a respectable size, and the men were grateful for it. 

The mess tent had supplied any scraps of desserts they had left over, and sticks were quickly gathered to roast whatever would be impaled. Instead of marshmallows, apples, wafers, and the day’s meat surprise were being warmed over the fire and hurled into the minefield if they caught on fire. 

Following the trajectory of one of the flaming meat-like items, Trapper let out a low whistle when it landed not too far from a mine. “That’s a real lethal projectile, there. These things are dangerous.” He shook his own roasting mystery meat and discarded it as the smoke from the fire swept back into his eyes.

He stared into the bonfire, and startled when Hawkeye sat down next to him with a thump. 

“No date tonight?” Trapper asked, noticing his friends disheveled clothing. 

“Nah, she had to go on shift. But how could I miss roasting unidentifiable mush in the middle of the night with the rest of the army?” Hawkeye responded, watching Blake and some lieutenant across the pit chat happily. 

“Brilliant idea, Henry!” He shouted suddenly and straightened up. 

“A toast to Henry!” Hawkeye pulled a mug out of his bathrobe, presumably filled with alcohol. The rest of the camp around the bonfire cheered, and followed suite. Henry chuckled uncomfortably and ducked his head. 

It was growing closer to midnight now, and people were either starting to go to sleep or come off of their shifts. With all eyes trained on Hawkeye after his earlier outburst, he stood up and began to pace around the bonfire.

“Back home, whenever we had a bonfire like this, we’d tell ghost stories. Bloody, miserable, terrible ghost stories. But I’ve had enough of blood for a whole year. I’ve got a ghost story that actually happened.” 

The camp groaned, and some people began to mutter.

Hawkeye threw the rest of his drink in the fire, and in the resulting burst of flame, he looked like a gaunt skeleton. The firelight draped off of his bony frame, and raising his arms over his head, he howled in his best ghost impression. 

The camp silenced, and Hawkeye began to tell his ghost story. 

“You know, Maine summers are something else. I would kill to be swarmed by mosquitos again, you know. Sometimes, it got so hot that the asphalt would turn sticky and all the neighborhood kids would gather around to see what they could toss into the tar. I think I still have some pennies embedded in Old Oak Road.” 

Trapper snorted and rolled his eyes. 

“Can we keep the rambling to a minimum? I have an early shift tomorrow.” 

“ _Thank you_ , honey. This is a story about a summer ghost. When school’s out and all the kids are spilling out into the woods, that’s when those summer ghosts get you. You can’t see them normally, but if you squint just right and unfocus your eyes as you stare into the drains or behind your shoulder in the mirror, you can just make out their shadows.”

Hawkeye turned his back to the crowd and addressed the fire. His silhouette, haloed by the light, cast the camp into darkness. 

“Of course, that could also be macular degeneration. But never mind that now. It might be because kids have better eyesight, or because adults are just less likely to believe in ghosts, but every summer, my dad would treat a few kids who were so shook up by these ‘ghosts’ that they almost would go into cardiogenic shock.”

“They would always run into the clinic screaming, sometimes bleeding from scratches that didn’t look exactly like an animal did it, sometimes practically naked, and they would scream and scream and scream. They would just holler their heads off.”

Hawkeye continued his pacing and smiled tightly at the memory of his hometown. 

“I would stand right behind my dad as he patched them up and gave them fluids. There was something in their eyes that was never quite right after they saw the ghost. It was like looking into an eye with a cataract, something white and cloudy.”

“One of the older nurses who helped out at the clinic, who was kinda Indian—I think she was Wabanaki—said it was from looking too hard at the spirit world. The white veil that separates the living from the dead got stuck in their eyes, and if it went untreated, they would go blind.” 

Sparing a glance at his audience, Hawkeye began to give his all to his performance. He struck a pose like a conquering general, and flicked his hair out of his eyes. 

“And so, like my namesake, I went out into those woods.”

He pointed into the distance, squinting at nothing. 

“I was going to find those ghosts… or something. I was pretty lonely, and I was pretty bored when I couldn’t hang around the clinic. There really isn’t much to do when it’s tourist season since everyone’s busy preparing for a bunch of New Yorkers to come up and gape at the ocean.”

He spun around, pleased with the raptured look Henry’s lieutenant was giving him. Trapper leaned around Hawkeye’s shadow and leered at her, and she huffed and turned away. Hawkeye continued, ignoring both of them. 

“The woods was just off the coast, and you had to wade through a bunch of muddy sand if you wanted to really get to where those kids said they saw the ghosts. That was just the beginning of summer, and a cold front had swept the whole upper part of Maine. It was so foggy and humid I couldn’t see out into the ocean where the fishing boats were anchored.”

“Well, I made my way into the woods, the fog still clinging to the lower branches of the pines. I walked through the footpaths that I had walked my entire life, but every turn I took felt like I was getting deeper and deeper into some strange part of the woods.”

Hawkeye sighed, closing his eyes. 

“Everyone in town knew where the kids had claimed to see the ghost. It was the back part of the woods, near this broken-down enormous house. It had a wraparound porch and these massive stairs with a crawlspace underneath them… and the bodies of seven murdered children.”

“This guy that used to live out there in that house back in the 1800s cut his entire family apart with an axe. His name was Captain James Purrinton, and when he found out what he did, he split his own throat open with a straight razor and bled out on the steps of his own house.” 

“The townspeople buried the family on their own land, and it’s been cursed ever since.” 

He looked down at his own hands, rubbed raw after doffing his surgical gear earlier, and continued in a quieter voice. 

“Those bloodstains are still on the steps, you see, because no matter how hard the women of the town scrubbed or how much soap they used, the blood would bubble up through the wood during the night, fresh as ever.”

The wind howling was the only thing that anyone heard, leaning in closer and closer to hear Hawkeye’s slowly quieting voice. 

“I remember when I saw that house, looming out at me in that gauzy white fog. The windows were busted, the entire frame was broken off and leaning to one side. The wood paneling on the side of the house was stripped and rotted…It was disgusting.” 

“And when I got close enough… I saw all that _blood_!” Hawkeye shrieked, and the audience startled and jumped back with a yelp. 

Hawkeye doubled over, guffawing madly. He looked at his audience as they settled back down and continued his story, back again in a normal voice.

“As much as I didn’t want to climb up those steps into the old Purrinton house, I knew I had to. I was like someone else was walking for me and drawing me closer and closer to that house.” 

“It was like walking into a crowded funeral. I felt… uninvited, almost like somebody was trying to push me out of there. The floor almost caved in at a point further in the house, and I followed the cracks in the floor around a corner to look at it.”

He paused, glancing around for the audience’s reaction. Henry’s lieutenant was huddled close to him, and Radar was nothing but the reflection of the fire in his glasses and wide eyes. Trapper was lounging, trying and failing to look unshaken. 

“Well, I’m glued to the floor, my heart is rattling around in my chest like a loose bolt, and I see movement out of the corner of my eyes.” Hawkeye says and flails dramatically towards a dark corner of the camp. 

“I look, and there’s Old Man Purrinton himself. He’s dripping from the split in his throat onto the floorboards, and he’s dragging himself closer… and the worst part is I can’t move. I’m stuck there to the bloody floorboards, and then he’s on top of me and I’m falling through the caved in floor.” 

“I’m screaming and I’m clawing at the dirt floor that I landed on and the ground is sucking me in and the house is collapsing around me. And I swear to this day, I could feel Captain Purrinton’s blood on me as I ran for the hills with everything I had.” 

He stops for breath and then continues. 

“I was screaming, and the moaning of that old ghost followed me. I was screaming, and I could feel his dead rotting hand on me. I was screaming, and screaming, and screaming until I woke up in my bed, my dad standing over me, confused.” 

“I was covered in mud, and scratched half to death. I was so convinced that I was going to go blind that I pretty much started bawling when I saw my dad. He had just come home from the clinic after treating another kid who had been pretty shaken up, and when he saw me, he just shook his head and gave me a glass of water. I slept for a whole day.” 

“Even now, when I think about it, it shakes me to the core. It could’ve been anyone out there in those woods. It was me… but it could’ve been you!”

He jumps and points into the audience, scanning for their giddy faces. They shriek appreciatively, and when he goes to sit down next to Trapper, they applaud and yell for another story. 

Somebody else stands to take the stage, and the ghost story goes on. 

Trapper leans over conspiratorially and whispers as loud as he dare into Hawkeye’s ear. 

“Did that really happen?” He asks, looking a little concerned about the idea of ghosts. 

“Oh, yeah. Purrinton really did kill his whole family. Crazy just seems to be a Maine thing, I guess.” Hawkeye responds, looking off into the bonfire. 

“That’s not what I meant— Radar, you look terrible. Don’t tell me you believe in your aunts old ghost stories?” 

Radar had shuffled up behind the two captains and was now looking up at the two men with a slightly tortured look on his face. 

“Well, I dunno. Kinda. Captain, do you believe in ghosts?” He said, addressing Hawkeye. 

Hawkeye sighed and sat back, thinking for a moment. 

“Well, I really don’t know. But here’s what I think.” He said, watching the shadows jump and crackle behind the slowly dwindling campfire. 

“I believe… that when a place has seen enough suffering and pain, there’s something left over there. A certain kind of ghost, if you’d like to call it that. The Purrinton house had certainly seen enough of that pain, and I suppose it was haunted by that past.”

Trapper nodded, quiet for once. 

“Do you think that we’ll be haunting Korea, then? When all of this is over? The war, I mean.” Radar said, quiet under the story being told in front of the bonfire. 

“This war, you mean? You hiding another one under your hat?” Trapper joked and patted the ground next to him. 

Radar sat, still waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know. I hope not. But who knows, huh?” Hawkeye said and nodded finally.

“I think I’m going to head back to the Swamp. Need anything, don’t bother. I’ll be unconscious before you can even think of it.” He said, standing and dusting off his fatigues. 

“Hey, Hawkeye! If Radar can’t sleep tonight, I’m blaming you!” Henry shouted, happy in the success of his morale boosting plan. 

“He's your child, Henry. The least you can do is tuck him in.” Hawkeye returned, and sauntered off to his tent in the darkness to drink away the last thought of cold hands, dead in the heat of summer, gripping at his bones.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized that a lot of Stephen King's works are set in Maine, and nobody else had taken advantage of this to abuse Hawkeye, so it got stuck in my head and refused to leave. This was such a blast to write, and I think I might do more! 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
